Making a Drop Shadow in Photoshop

Go under the layer menu to effects and pick drop shadow (I think its in ver 5). Or you can duplicate the layer, click on the "T" symbol in the layer window then change type color to black. Set the opacity for that layer to around 50% and if you want, add a little blurring. move that layer a few pixels down and to the right of the original, making sure it is beneath the original.

Use the "drop shadow" effect:You can right click on the text layer and scroll down to "effects". There are several types of effects - pick drop shadow and make sure selection box is clicked. Choose your color, intensity, distance, and opacity. There are various types of shadows that can be generated from this, they are listed in a pull-down dialog box on the "drop shadow" selector. For some reason Photoshop 5 often defaults to the "screen" type of drop shadow, which does very little. Move it up to the top one in the list, I think it's called "normal" and the shadows will show up.

Making a shadow layer:

If you are copying layers to get your shadow, you might need to "render layer" to get it to blur and change, else the program still treats the layer as editable text. For this you need to make a shadow layer and have the shadow layer active, go to "Layers", "Type" and "Render Layer", which makes the shadow text into plain colors. From this point on, you can no longer edit the text, because the "brains" are gone! But now you can apply filters, etc, to the words.